Deep roots to a prime matter

From Notre Dame's campus paper, James Matthew Wilson addresses a crisis in today's Catholics. Have Catholics forgotten their identity and how to live the Catholic faith in the world? Or is it deeper? Is it that Catholics don't even know, or perhaps even care, about what the Church teaches and have in its stead taken up what the world teaches?

The Death of Catholic Culture

Idiocracy

You may have heard of a film called Office Space directed by Mike Judge. Well, you've probably heard he's got a new movie out called Idiocracy. No? Well, if you haven't heard about this film it's probably because Idiocracy, like Children of Men, was barely promoted by the studio. According to Slate:

Both movies were scandalously underpromoted by the studios releasing them. Judge's film sat on a shelf for two years at Fox before being hacked down to its current 84-minute running time and dumped, unadvertised, into only a few cities on the slowest movie weekend of the year. Children of Men's fate has been slightly less ignominious; it was released nationwide, largely untrumpeted, on Christmas Day, and only this week, after countless critics put the movie on their 10-best lists, has Universal rushed to mount a too-little-too-late push for Oscar consideration.

The burial of Children of Men was lame, but comprehensible. Figuring that few viewers would flock to such an unremitting downer of a film, Universal must have decided to market the movie modestly, hoping at least to break even with attention from art-house audiences. But Fox's choice to withhold Idiocracy even from the markets where it was most likely to find cult viewers—New York? San Francisco?—and to eschew all advertising is simply bewildering. The shrouding of Idiocracy in what amounts to a marketing burqa is especially ironic given that the film's most pointed satire is aimed at the ubiquity of advertising in American life.

Since a common theme of both these movies is the West's inability to make babies, this has Daniel Larison wondering if breeding scares Hollywood. He blogs on the subject here and here.

Anyway, I finally got my hands on a copy of Idiocracy and watched it last night. The plot of the movie is that two Joe Schmoes are frozen as part of an Army experiment and are supposed to be brought out of their capsules in one year. (Well, one of the Joe Schmoes is a prostitute played by Maya Rudolf; the other is a very average soldier played by Luke Wilson.) When the experiment is canceled their capsules are misplaced and aren't opened for another 500 years. By this time, human beings have devolved into a race of morons because elites have stopped having children while only the underclass has continued to breed. Things have gotten so bad that crops will no longer grow because people "water" them with a sports drink--Brawn the "Thirst Mutilator"--reasoning that, after all, "Brawn's got 'lectrolytes."

It's not a great film, but if you want to have a good laugh at evolution-niks, at sophisticated yuppies who refuse to breed (DINKs--double income, no kids), and at our inane, Beavis-n-Butthead, consumerist culture, Idiocracy is your flick.

Mind your manners

I love this post on manners by blogger Dulcinea. Here's an excerpt:

traditions and manners have been scoffed & eschewed in modern society, most notably since the tiresome '60s and '70s. respect, true tolerance borne of acknowledging personal dignity, and the little customs that smooth our casual contact with those at the grocery store, post office gas station, have all been lost. try talking to a check-out clerk: "i'm doing fine, thank you. how are you?" nearly always, their faces relax, sometimes they smile: suddenly they become human, instead of paid slaves doing menial jobs to serve you. it is a striking testimony to how much our actions mean. what we do or do not do affects others. small actions and words can either be an affirmation of personal worth, or can be insulting affronts that can damage the dignity of others in our little worlds.

i noticed, too, how the liberals lack basic social manners. those who have thrown off these traditions as inhibiting your "real" personality are notoriously rude, even vitriolic, with no respect or toleration from anyone who's views differ from their own. they portray a selfish, self-centred philosophy: accept me as i am or deal with it. why should i? we all have rough edges and imperfections that should not be tolerated because they are immature, petty, rude, vicious, and uncivilized. manners are a proof of natural virtue, a sign that we can raise our communications to a level based on the intelligent recognition of basic human dignity--a dignity that has been lost both in mind and in manner.

I think Christians, in word and deed, should come across to others as rather bizarre. To me, this is part of evangelization, to act in a way, not affected but sincere, that makes people say, "What is it about this person that makes him not like everyone else?" In an age when being cynical and sarcastic are the norm, we can stand out by being gentle and sincere. When crudité reigns supreme, we can stand out by being measured in our speech and avoiding coarseness. We should strive not for a false politeness that tolerates what is deplorable in the name of pluralism, but a true politeness that recognizes every person as a unique creation drawn by the finger of God. I think when we go about trying to be suave and to show that we can be just as crude as pagans in an attempt to ward off accusations of prudery, we become little more than write-off Christians. I sometimes find myself falling into this trap. This isn't to say that there isn't room for some good natured bawdiness à la Chaucer or Rabelais.